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A review by kiwi_fruit
The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly
3.0
This is an informative and comprehensive book on the potato famine which wiped out a third of the Irish population from 1845 to 1849. Drawing both from facts and anecdotes, it illustrates the social, economic and political situation of Ireland in the middle of 1800s when the potato blight hit the country. It chronicles, in exhaustive detail, its swift spread trough the countryside and vividly describes the snowballing consequences of deadly famine, life-threatening diseases (typhus, dysentery and fevers) and mass emigration.
It’s a hard book to read. While I loved the start, as the book progressed, it really dragged for me. The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming; there is so much information on human misery and suffering that the reader can absorb.
I felt that the author piled historical data and figures on top of each other without structuring his arguments with clarity, the author seeming to randomly point the finger to either side of the Irish sea for causes of the human catastrophe. At times he blames the Celtic peasant roots, the backward economic model, the poor infrastructure, the Anglo-Irish land owners’ management of their land or Nationalist rebellious factions for the catastrophic situation, and then, a couple of sentences later, puts the responsibility squarely on the impotence of the British government, the “education” program of the Moralist politicians, the greed of the food merchants, the racist propaganda of the press or insensitive political economists.
The timeline of the middle chapters was also inconsistent (jumping around often), contributing to my confusion. The ending of the was also quite abrupt, book concludes with 1947, the afterward briefly mentioning the years 1848 and 1849, but in fact the potato blight did not end then, it reappeared in 1848, so it would seem that the author simply ran out of time.
After such comprehensive analysis of the economic and human disaster caused by the blight, I would have liked more information how Ireland successfully overcome the ordeal. Unfortunately, the author limit himself to only the following scanty statements in the afterword section:
““During the 1850s, Irish farms grew steadily larger and Irish agricultural profits steadily bigger
...
In the mid-1860s, peasant agitation for land reform revived. The agitation led to the Land War in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Land War produced a series of reforms that reversed the land seizures of the plantation era. On the eve of World War I, 11.1 million of Ireland’s 20 million acres were again owned by Irish proprietors, and, as before the famine, many of the proprietors were small farmers.”
Overall this was eye opener book for me and a great source of information. Although it it proved not as good as I hoped it would be, I don't regret reading it. 3.5 stars
Fav. Quotes:
The plan presupposed conditions that existed only in a nation with a modern economy and a modern infrastructure, and, except for the regions around Belfast and Dublin, Ireland was one of the most backward countries in Europe. Unlike Britain and France, she had no significant class of rural shopkeepers to distribute food in the interior; and the relief committee system was an imperfect substitute, particularly in remote regions of the west and midlands, where local gentry was lacking to organize a committee and the nearest source of commercial food might be twenty or thirty miles away. The Irish economy was also too small to efficiently regulate food prices through market competition, as the British economy did; and the deficiency of domestic mills meant that, in a time of acute food shortages, relief provisions had to be ground in England or sent 1,300 miles away, to the mills at the big British naval base in Malta.
British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.
The Times and The Economist stopped lecturing the Irish on sloth, violence, ignorance, superstition, personal hygiene, and dependence on government; there were fewer comparisons with the Eskimos and South Sea Islanders; the adjective “aboriginal” was used less frequently to modify the noun “Irish,” as in the construction “aboriginal Irish”
It’s a hard book to read. While I loved the start, as the book progressed, it really dragged for me. The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming; there is so much information on human misery and suffering that the reader can absorb.
I felt that the author piled historical data and figures on top of each other without structuring his arguments with clarity, the author seeming to randomly point the finger to either side of the Irish sea for causes of the human catastrophe. At times he blames the Celtic peasant roots, the backward economic model, the poor infrastructure, the Anglo-Irish land owners’ management of their land or Nationalist rebellious factions for the catastrophic situation, and then, a couple of sentences later, puts the responsibility squarely on the impotence of the British government, the “education” program of the Moralist politicians, the greed of the food merchants, the racist propaganda of the press or insensitive political economists.
The timeline of the middle chapters was also inconsistent (jumping around often), contributing to my confusion. The ending of the was also quite abrupt, book concludes with 1947, the afterward briefly mentioning the years 1848 and 1849, but in fact the potato blight did not end then, it reappeared in 1848, so it would seem that the author simply ran out of time.
After such comprehensive analysis of the economic and human disaster caused by the blight, I would have liked more information how Ireland successfully overcome the ordeal. Unfortunately, the author limit himself to only the following scanty statements in the afterword section:
““During the 1850s, Irish farms grew steadily larger and Irish agricultural profits steadily bigger
...
In the mid-1860s, peasant agitation for land reform revived. The agitation led to the Land War in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Land War produced a series of reforms that reversed the land seizures of the plantation era. On the eve of World War I, 11.1 million of Ireland’s 20 million acres were again owned by Irish proprietors, and, as before the famine, many of the proprietors were small farmers.”
Overall this was eye opener book for me and a great source of information. Although it it proved not as good as I hoped it would be, I don't regret reading it. 3.5 stars
Fav. Quotes:
The plan presupposed conditions that existed only in a nation with a modern economy and a modern infrastructure, and, except for the regions around Belfast and Dublin, Ireland was one of the most backward countries in Europe. Unlike Britain and France, she had no significant class of rural shopkeepers to distribute food in the interior; and the relief committee system was an imperfect substitute, particularly in remote regions of the west and midlands, where local gentry was lacking to organize a committee and the nearest source of commercial food might be twenty or thirty miles away. The Irish economy was also too small to efficiently regulate food prices through market competition, as the British economy did; and the deficiency of domestic mills meant that, in a time of acute food shortages, relief provisions had to be ground in England or sent 1,300 miles away, to the mills at the big British naval base in Malta.
British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.
The Times and The Economist stopped lecturing the Irish on sloth, violence, ignorance, superstition, personal hygiene, and dependence on government; there were fewer comparisons with the Eskimos and South Sea Islanders; the adjective “aboriginal” was used less frequently to modify the noun “Irish,” as in the construction “aboriginal Irish”